1. achowfin

    EDEM630 Tomorrow Is Here! #SP4Ed

    by
    Learning Cloud Hubs set up by children who grew up in refugee camps; leading development in their country. So you have been wondering  how it is possible that children who grew up in dire situations could possibly be leading change in their country. The natural deductions that are made are usually that these children would […]
  2. shannotated

    Scary shark gets flower power #AAG 8

    by
    Inspired by an article that Jim shared (http://societeperrier.com/articles/create-and-repeat-an-animated-gif-tribute-to-andy-warhol/) I really wanted to create something strange. Flower images from http://www.clker.com/search/flower/1 Shark image from...
  3. ary

    The Cure for “Ozymandias Melancholia”: MoMa’s Art and Inquiry MOOC

    by
    In my most recent dabbling in the world of MOOCs, Art and Inquiry: Museum Strategies for Your Classroom, a five week Coursera MOOC taught by MoMA, we are being asked to think about why we should engage in inquiry around art. While pondering this important question, I’ve also been thinking about permanence, and remembered one of my favorite Woody Allen quotes.

    Woody Allen came up with a condition he calls "Ozymandias Melancholia." He defines the phenomenon as, "that sad and depressed feeling you get when you realize that no matter how great and majestic and important something is at the time, in time it's going to pass. Just like the poem - eventually, time kills everything. It's just that rotting statue of Ozymandias, a once-great statue, and now a broken-down piece of marble in the desert. So you get a depressed feeling because it gives you a sense of the futility of life, that all that you're working for, and all the things that seem so meaningful, are nothing."   

    Saul Steinberg, The Spiral 1964

    We know Woody Allen is a self-proclaimed whiner, a statue will decay if left in the desert, and art in all its forms is fragile. Whether on a prehistoric cave, or preserved in a museum, art can live for centuries to be discovered, admired and studied for generations, but inevitably art dies. Although we are aware of this, and our own mortality, this does not stop us from creating art because through art, we seek to understand what it means to be human. We create and preserve art for the purpose of inquiry, to express human thought and emotion, our frailties and strength. When we look at and talk about art, we teach and learn about our past, and discover how art, whether modern or ancient, reveals so many parallels to our present day existence. Through art, the artist speaks to many generations, transcending time, engaging the beholder to question, debate, even recontextualize the art to bridge the work’s past purpose to fit a modern day function. Art lives on throughout the ages with the sole purpose of helping us recognize our common humanity, not the futility of life. We engage in inquiry around art to bear witness and marvel at what the artist, the human being, is capable of expressing and achieving.


    We never stop creating art even though we recognize time kills everything. If ever we are affected by "Ozymandias Melancholia" and think of the futility of life, art exists to remind us of the power of our desire to express ourselves and to leave an indelible mark. The artist forges ahead to make art in a meaningless world because the artist, and we, as the beholder, know art has meaning and purpose, and defies time. Perhaps it's our quest to defy time why we never abandon creating and looking at art.    
              
                             
  4. byzantiumbooks

    What are you smoking in that pipe?

    by

    These are not sunflowers.

    Another in a never-ending series of not-a-pipe images. This one has sunflowers from gif-favicon.com (free use, from a public domain original) emitting from Magritte’s pipe. Or so it seems.

    I wish I had a picture of my first car, a 1964 Chevy Corvair, white with daisy …

  5. achowfin

    EDEM630: Trends In Education # SP4Ed

    by
    This has been an interesting process; sifting through information and deciding whether something will be a trend or shift into the archive room as just a good idea. Manoeuvring through the various predicted trends from various sources, I have identified a few that just jump out of the page at you. Open source learning-MOOCs Learning […]
  6. Hatchet Jack

    Happy Childhood Memories!

    by
    #ds106 #dailycreate: Write a thank you note to the Easter Bunny or other childhood fantasy character. http://t.co/pLKWQKrE7t — ds106 Daily Create (@ds106dc) August 8, 2013 Well, you know how childhoods can be. So I did have some fantasy characters, but most of them are not really appropriate for this venue. So I will go with […]
  7. byzantiumbooks

    Panoramic 360 degree office tdc576

    by

    Home Office Panorama

    The assignment for tdc576 is “Make a 360deg panoramic photo of a room in your house.” I did not use an app, and found out late in the process that my Motorola Photon Android phone has a panoramic mode for the camera. I set up my Nikon …

  8. shannotated

    People who can’t make eggs AAG #4

    by
    You know, I really scrambled my brain to try and think of a good gif for this challenge. I ended up calling my old friend Benedict to ask for his advice on what to do. He said that what it all boiled down to was a just a good ol fashioned plain gif. I wouldn’t […]

UMW Spring 2024 (Bond & Groom)

Welcome to Paul Bond and Jim Groom’s Spring 2024 ds106

Student Blogs

(9 posts)

[feedroll tag=”spring24bond”]

Spread some comment love! Find a random post from this section